It was within the first building that the current base commander moved his office about. The soldiers had dubbed it Echo Base, E for electric, or maybe Edison, and the name had gradually expanded to denote the entire military compound. Supposedly the name was some sort of classic sci-fi reference, but to what he’d never known. It was twenty-four stories tall, the tallest of an interconnected cluster of four buildings that, with their associated parking lots, sat at the north end of the property the military had taken for their own.
On the south side of the buildings were two whole square city blocks of cheerful plazas with fountains and modern art sculptures and decorative landscaping. Or so he’d seen in old photos—once the military claimed the area those two blocks, plus the parking lot of the adjacent Leland hotel, and the park just north of that, the area became parking lots and, eventually, an airfield for his rotary wing aircraft when he no longer had the resources to guarantee the security of his birds at the airport some fifteen miles west. The fountains had been filled in, the grass paved over, the sculptures torn down. In their place was a sea of concrete, with helicopter landing pads on the south and east side of Echo Base. The two hangars for their aircraft sat on the eastern end of the concrete, almost in the dead center of the base. Most of his tanks squatted in the numerous surrounding parking lots, which accounted for nearly half the area inside the perimeter, their main guns facing outward protectively. If only Echo Base was as impregnable as it looked. Echo Base was at the south end of the Blue Zone, the strictly controlled and patrolled strip in the middle of downtown where everyone tried to pretend the war was happening somewhere else, to other people.
There were still a few hardy souls working for the power company in Echo, but most of the building was vacant office space and the Army officers were free to move their offices around. The view from his eighth-floor office had been much better, but that really was too high. If the guerillas launched a major attack on the building the first thing to go (after the windows) would be the power, which meant the elevators. If his aides had to run up and down eight floors in the thick of it, most likely in the dark, he wouldn’t have to worry about the opposition, his own people would kill him. The enlisted troops were billeted in the ground floor of the adjacent office building.
Echo Base was an oddly contoured piece of real estate, roughly the shape of a rectangle, half a mile long by a third wide. Lay the rectangle long side down, chop off the top right corner, turn the rest clockwise a hair, and there was Echo Base. It was bordered on the north and west by sunken multilane expressways, and to the south by a simple four lane surface street. Running through the lower third of the rectangle was an avenue fully seven lanes wide, blocked at both ends by manned gates—those were the only ways in and out of the base. Between Echo and the sunken expressway to the west was a huge casino, now abandoned. The perimeter of the base was a tangle of chain link, razor wire, jersey barriers and dragon teeth, patrolled constantly day and night by men on foot and in vehicles.
The east side was the most vulnerable. There Echo Base ended at a simple surface street, four lanes across, with five and six story buildings perching right on the opposite curb. The 27-story former Federal Building and the similarly-sized AT&T headquarters, both at the southeast corner of the base perimeter, helped block visual access to much of the base. General Block had ordered many of the buildings in the immediate vicinity demolished, but the east was still the direction from which they took most of the harassing sniper fire.
The Federal Building had been profoundly ugly even when new; it looked like a high-rise prison. It had been so badly damaged in the fighting it had been abandoned, and the drastically reduced-in-number federal agents still in the city worked out of the public safety headquarters. The PSH seemed a good spiritual stand-in for the city—it was nearly a ghost town with the police and fire departments present in name only.
In addition to those structures, the power company buildings and the AT&T skyscraper, Echo Base contained the burned-out shell of a small commercial building that had once housed a bar, a former Salvation Army office (now abandoned), a twelve-story apartment building, and a twenty-story hotel called the Leland.
The Leland hotel was at the eastern edge of the Army base’s perimeter, its ground floor wrapped in layer upon layer of concertina wire, inside a quadruple row of dragon’s teeth. The concrete obstacles were designed to stop car bombs and tanks, but did nothing against the bullets which slammed into hotel far too often for comfort even at this late date. Although it had been almost a year since anyone had lobbed a 40mm grenade through a window of the hotel, and years since it had taken an RPG.
The officers, when not on duty, still slept there, but on the west and north sides of the hotel, where the Tangos would have to fling their ordnance a thousand yards or more, across the length of Echo Base, to reach the hotel. Most of the civilian contract employees and city government workers lived up at the north end of the Blue Zone in what was called the New Center area. There was a hotel there, the St. Regis, that had been commandeered by the government not too long into the war, and it was connected to many of the adjacent high-rises by pedestrian walkways above the streets, further enhancing security.
General Block hadn’t been the first casualty in the Leland, but he was the most well-known. He’d died half-asleep, drinking his morning coffee, staring out a south-facing window, cut down by sniper fire from a derelict office building nearly four hundred yards away. The guerillas had known exactly which window to fire into and were gone long before troops could identify the building from where the shot had been fired. A search had turned up a rifle—an old Remington 700 bolt-action in .270 Win, topped with a cheap 3-9X scope—in a room on the fourth floor.
The serial number on the weapon had been run, and it came back registered to a man at an address in one of the small bedroom communities to the south. Two federal firearm agents accompanied a squad of soldiers on a raid of the address… which resulted in two more dead, and four injured, as the guerrillas had boobytrapped the house.
Forensic analysis of General Block’s body and the window in his room revealed bullet impacts from three different rifles, fired so closely together witnesses only heard one gunshot. The technique was an advanced one—the glass might deflect a bullet, or nerves might get the better of one man, and he’d jerk the trigger and send the shot awry, but with three snipers? One of the bullets was bound to find its mark, after the others helped soften up the glass.
It hadn’t been luck, spotting the general standing before that window. One of the hotel employees, a maid, never showed up for work the next morning, so there was no mystery to how they’d known which window to aim for.
Block had been appointed the area commander not long after the local ground war, such as it was, was over. He’d been in charge for seven years, far longer than anyone had expected the war to last, before being assassinated. As for the man who was General Block’s successor, he had a well-appointed room in the hotel that he was using more often lately, but still found himself regularly sleeping in his office, or in one of the rooms nearby. The building seemed to be filled with couches, half of them expensive leather jobs. He was stretched out on a long loveseat, half awake, when Major Cooper came in to wake him.